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We’re Going Through Hell, and Men Need to Join Us There

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

I know what you’re thinking: Not another sexual harassment post. Bear with me.

I’ve spoken to many women over the past few weeks who feel exhausted by the current news cycle, I count myself among them: the endless onslaught of horrific stories, interspersed with the occasional, extremely bad non-apology.

I know it’s tempting to look away, and it’s fine if you have to; please take care of yourself. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad feminist. But it’s important the stories keep coming out, that the issue remains in the public discourse. It feels like we are in a moment of momentum, working our way towards something better, however clumsy, messy, and painful the process can be. It’s a little cheesy, but I keep thinking of the quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” This momentum feels like hell, and we have to keep going.

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Language Acquisition

Dennis K. Johnson/Lonely Planet Images/Getty

Diana Spechler | Longreads | October 2017 | 16 minutes (3,875 words)

It begins at an outdoor café while you’re working for a month in central Mexico. From one table away, you zero in on his brown forearm, the two black cuffs tattooed around it. You want to touch those cuffs, encircle his arm with your hands. Soon you’ll learn the word esposas, which means both “handcuffs” and “wives,” but today you know only polite Spanish, please-and-thank-you Spanish. You smile at him until he approaches. When he asks if you have a boyfriend, you start to cry and can’t stop. You want to explain something to him — that you loved someone the way a dog loves her owner — but the only available language is snot. He holds a cocktail napkin to your nose. “Blow,” he says. For a second, you think he’s serious. Then you laugh so hard you feel something shift, the way the sky shifts from blue to pink.

***

His socks never match. His clothes and his dog are splattered with paint. His mother embroiders designs on his guayaberas and does his laundry. At night, he crashes wherever he is — on a porch, on a couch, by the lake in his pueblo. He takes you hiking to see the bursting white moon. He takes you to meet the shaman who can erase your pain with feathers. He takes you to see pyramids and an eagle carved into a mountain. He knows how to build a fire. He knows how to prepare a sweat lodge. He knows how to get people to buy him drinks. He knows how to wrap your hair around one hand and undress you with the other. During sex, he says all kinds of things you wish you understood. By the lake, you get so stoned together he stares at your face and asks if you’re Buddha.

“If I were Buddha, I couldn’t tell you,” you say.

“You have the face of Buddha.” He takes a drag, exhales a cloud, leans back on one elbow. “But don’t tell me. You are right. It is better not to tell me.”

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“No Fatties”: When Health Care Hurts

Illustration by Hannah Perry

Carey Purcell  |  Longreads  |  October 2017  | 4280 words (16 minutes)

Kasey Smith began gaining weight as a teenager. The numbers on the scale started increasing overnight, and no matter how few calories she consumed, they continued to go up. “It will even out,” she thought, crediting the change to puberty and hormones. But it didn’t, and her hair and skin began changing as well. “Something was definitely wrong.”

Each medical appointment, and there were many, concluded with doctors telling her to go on a diet. Smith (not her real name) remembers telling the endocrinologist about her frustrations with burning off the 900 calories she consumed each day and still gaining weight. “He looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you can cut back your McDonald’s to twice a week.’ I was stunned silent, and I went into the bathroom and broke down. ‘He doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m just fucking with him.’”

As Smith’s weight went up, her food intake went down. Her mother signed her up for Nutrisystem, and her diet hung on the fridge for everyone in her family to see. Shame and humiliation narrowed her life down to three questions: what to eat, what not to eat, and how to burn more calories. She began to form dangerous habits, sometimes eating little more than lettuce.

Smith ultimately received a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that can lead to excess male hormones, irregular menstrual cycles, and weight gain. She was prescribed Metformin and quickly began to lose weight, but the damage had been done. The 18-year-old developed anorexia, leaving for college at 130 pounds and coming back four months later and 30 pounds lighter, her hair falling out in clumps.

No one thought anything was wrong.

“I would go to the doctor, and there were no red flags. It was ‘You look fantastic!’ Not ‘This is alarming.’” Smith continued starving herself for another year until she ended up in the hospital, undergoing a colectomy to remove a foot and a half of her intestines, which had twisted as a result of her severe calorie restriction.

One year after the surgery, her worst nightmare returned: She was gaining weight. Celiac disease was the cause this time, but it wasn’t diagnosed until after Smith was in the habit of purging the little food she ate every day. She would regularly run in the park and pass out afterward. “I would starve all day, then I’d eat something at night, then I would purge it. In my head, I’m thinking, ‘I’m literally not consuming anything. The weight has to fall off.’”

She realized she needed professional help, and Smith found a therapist who specialized in eating disorders and began treatment at The Renfrew Center, a residential facility in Pennsylvania. She continues to struggle with discussing her weight at medical appointments. After she told her endocrinologist about her treatment at Renfrew, his reply was “I see you need to lose some weight.”

* * *

According to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, one out of three doctors responds to obesity negatively and associates it with poor hygiene, hostility, dishonesty, and noncompliance, viewing fat patients as “lazy, lacking in self-control, non-compliant, unintelligent, weak-willed and dishonest.”

“Doctors may think they are doing their jobs by focusing on patients’ weights,” said Dr. Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. But the effects of weight discrimination, both physical and mental, can be harmful to patients. “I do see this in health providers just as much as the general population, which is that maybe stigma isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it will motivate people to lose weight. Maybe it will provide incentives for weight loss. But that is not what we see in research. We see the opposite — that in fact, stigmatizing people about their weight actually reinforces behaviors in health that increase body weight and obesity.”

The doctor looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you can cut back your McDonald’s to twice a week.’

As weight discrimination has increased in recent years — roughly 40 percent of adults report having experienced some form of weight stigma — so have obesity rates. A positive correlation between experiencing weight bias and developing eating disorders has been documented, and two studies have reported that overweight children are more likely to binge after being teased about their weight. Nor do these habits change as we age. In a 2006 study of more than 2,000 overweight and obese women who were part of a weight loss support group, 79 percent said they turned to food after experiencing weight stigma. Another common response: refusing to diet.

Johanna Tan encountered that stigma when she gained 80 pounds in three months after beginning the hormonal birth control Depo-Provera. Her doctor suggested weight loss, and she chose a weight loss clinic. In the weeks after undergoing her doctor-mediated diet of 500 to 800 calories a day, Tan began experiencing episodes of chest pain so severe she made more than one trip to the emergency room. Her general practitioner blamed her symptoms on her large breasts. “Never mind that my boobs have always been this big, and this was a new symptom,” Tan said, laughing wryly as she explained she had been performing special exercises and getting massage treatments to help ease the symptoms. But it wasn’t her breasts that were causing the pain, it was her gallbladder. Gallstones had blocked her common bile duct, and if left untreated it could cause acute liver failure. The cause of the gallstones? Rapid weight loss. Neither Tan’s weight gain nor her loss had been correctly assessed by her doctors. (Depo-Provera lists weight gain as a common side effect. When Tan voiced concerns to one doctor, she was told, “Everyone gets more hungry. You just need to not eat more.”)

The assumption that any health issues a fat person experiences can be chalked up to weight has not gone unnoticed by the fat community. Marilyn Wann was motivated to pursue fat activism after what she describes as her Really Bad Day, when a man she was dating told her he was embarrassed to introduce her to his friends because of her weight, and she was denied health insurance because Blue Shield of California deemed her morbidly obese.

“This double whammy of social and institutional exclusion based on my weight woke me up,” she said. “Until then, I had hoped to avoid the impact of anti-fat attitudes by avoiding the whole topic. But hiding and silence and avoidance didn’t keep the yuck from finding me. So I recognized that I had to come out as a fat person. The next day, I went to a copy store and made up business cards for my new print zine, which I decided to call FAT!SO? — ‘For People Who Don’t Apologize for Their Size!’ Immediately, my life became less stressful. Of course, I still encounter anti-fat attitudes and weight-based exclusions, but I have drawn a line between me and the hatefulness. It makes a huge difference.”

Wann still experiences bias, especially at the doctor. “I know before I enter the door that the whole system prioritizes its prejudice over my well-being,” she said. “The prejudice is what’s necessary to the institution as it stands. The medical establishment, the insurance agencies, public health agencies that are government-based have always advanced their agenda on the back of fat people. … The institutions of our supposed health systems — in the government agencies, in the insurance companies, in all of the medical practices — are saturated or have deeply ingrained anti-fat bigotry.”

Establishing the balance of information and compassion while discussing a patient’s weight is constantly on Rebecca Zuckerman’s mind. “It puts medical professionals in a weird catch-22,” said Zuckerman, a fourth-year medical student at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, who understands the motivation of fat activists but whose education includes the negative medical impacts of obesity. “It’s something I’ve struggled with personally. You can only explain it and tell people their options. You can ask if it’s OK to talk about weight loss or give more information. If they say, ‘No, I don’t want to hear it,’ you have to respect that.”

Still, the intense schedule of medical professionals, who are often allotted only 15 to 20 minutes per patient, often results in less-than-ideal communication. It’s easier to reach for the quickest conclusion: telling the patient to lose weight. Says Zuckerman, “A lot of doctors and nurses experience burnout, and they start losing empathy and don’t view the patients as people anymore. Your hands are tied to stay within those 20 minutes. Everyone’s trying to make more money, and the doctors are a cog in the wheel.”

That’s along with pervasive stereotyping about fat people in the medical community. In a study of 318 family physicians, two-thirds reported that their obese patients lacked self-control, and 39 percent stated that their obese patients were lazy. Even health care professionals specializing in nutrition thought poorly of their obese patients: “Attitudes toward obesity and the obese among professionals,” a study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, reports that 87 percent of health care professionals specializing in nutrition believe that obese persons are indulgent, 74 percent believe that they have family problems, and 32 percent believe that they lack willpower. In 2013, the American Medical Association labeled obesity a disease.

The misdiagnoses that occur lead directly to poor health outcomes. Johanna Tan ultimately spent three years in pain, leading to four weeks of hospitalization, a series of invasive surgical procedures, and lengthy rehab — procedures that wouldn’t have been necessary had the gallstones been caught earlier. While she was enduring severe pain following her first surgery and struggling to complete her postsurgical rehab, the hospital staff accused her of being lazy. “I spent two weeks in hospital post-surgery,” she said, “copping abuse for being lazy and not participating in my own rehab, before they realized they fucked up.” Tan said the nurses were condescending, saying, “I know it hurts. It’s major surgery. You still have to get up.” The pain didn’t ease until her doctors realized they had missed some gallstones and had to perform a second surgery. Tan wasn’t able to walk more than 10 feet at a time for the first month following her surgeries. It took six months for her to be able to walk further than a block.

* * *

Fat patients also often find themselves facing off with doctors who refuse to write prescriptions or referrals until patients lose an arbitrary amount of weight, a common scenario for those seeking joint replacement surgery. Despite being in “crazy amounts of pain,” Melinda Belles-Preston was required to lose 30 pounds before receiving an operation on her hips. Losing between one and two pounds a week, a healthy pace according to the Centers for Disease Control, would delay her surgery by several months. Heavier patients see longer lags. A required loss of 50 to 100 pounds can postpone a procedure for months or even years unless the patient undergoes weight loss surgery. Without surgery, the time spent in pain is prolonged, opening the door to painkiller dependence. It took Belles-Preston roughly six months to lose the weight, and she was in pain the entire time.

“Going in nutrient-deprived and starved is probably not a good way to send someone into heart surgery or major any surgery,” Wann said; her tone made it clear she was stating what she thought should be obvious. “Someone who’s been losing weight may have worse outcomes than someone who’s stayed the same weight. … It’s amazing how someone can just look at you and decide how a random number of pounds can shift you from someone who doesn’t deserve care to someone who does.”

Pain management was barely discussed when Virgie Tovar, activist and author of Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion, went to the doctor after being injured on an amusement park ride. Suffering what she described as “debilitating back spasms” that made movement “electrifyingly painful,” she was told she had to lose weight before anything could be done for her. “It was like this dogged commitment to not helping me until I was at a different weight,” she recalled. “Let’s say I lose weight at what is considered a normal pace that doesn’t endanger a person’s life. For me to get to the weight you’re talking about is like 10 years. So I just get to be in pain until I’m at that weight. And if I’m still in pain after a decade of weight loss, then you’ll think about taking care of this?”

Ideally, preventive care helps patients avoid catastrophic health problems, but it’s not always accessible to fat patients, whether because of issues with doctors, issues with technology, or both. Fat patients have been refused medical screenings, such as Pap smears, mammograms, and colonoscopies, that are considered routine and vital for thin patients. The American Cancer Society advises women to get mammograms yearly beginning at age 45 and colonoscopies every 10 years beginning at age 50, but fat people often struggle to find facilities that will perform the screenings and are told they cannot fit in the machines.

A required loss of 50 to 100 pounds can postpone a procedure for months or even years… It took Belles-Preston roughly six months to lose the weight, and she was in pain the entire time.

The importance of an MRI comes from its ability to provide higher-quality images. But the machines that provide those images are small, and other options, like CAT scans or ultrasound, don’t provide a comparable alternative. “All those scans need to penetrate the body to create an image. If a body is larger and has more fat tissue to penetrate, the image quality is poorer and blurrier, and it’s harder to make out structures,” Zuckerman explained. “It’s harder for skilled radiologists to diagnose things in patients who are larger for that reason. … The fact is, MRI machines are tiny. Some people literally cannot fit in them. So we do something else like an ultrasound or CT that is not quite as good. It’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t give us the image quality that an MRI does. You run the risk of missing something because the picture that you’re getting is not clear.”

The need for hospital equipment that can accommodate fat people has grown, and imaging devices are now available. This equipment is not available everywhere, however, and sometimes patients are referred to their local zoos. When Wann called the San Francisco Zoo’s medical department to ask about accessing its technology, the person on the phone sighed and said, “I wish people would stop saying that,” referring to requests to use the department’s CT and MRI scanners. While vet schools and zoos have larger-capacity devices, they can’t allow human subjects, and scanning humans in machines intended for animal subjects is banned by formal policies in most facilities. “That’s really beyond their certification,” explained Wann. They’re not licensed as an institution to practice medicine on people. Their entire institutional certification is being put on the line because our human medical system refuses to accommodate people above a certain size. It draws an arbitrary line and says, ‘Go beyond this line, and they’re monsters.’”

Without being properly screened, patients can’t be diagnosed. A 2008 review of previously published studies, 32 in total, reported that white, female, obese patients were less likely to be screened for breast and cervical cancer. A study from 2006 reported that only 68 percent of women with a BMI of greater than 55 were given Pap tests, while 86 percent of other women were tested.

In some cases, this is a result of fat patients opting out of health care entirely, even if they otherwise have the ability to access health care facilities and are insured: According to the International Journal of Obesity, 19 percent of participants reported that if they felt stigmatized about their weight by their doctor, they would avoid future medical appointments, and 21 percent said they would seek a new doctor.

“Fat people don’t go to the doctor often. They tend to avoid it,” writer and activist Kitty Stryker said. “A lot of fat people are ashamed of being naked. They don’t want to be touched. When I say I have a lower-back problem, I know they’re going to say, ‘Lose some weight, and that will go away.’ So what’s the point? Why bother continuing to try to get to the root of my health problems when I know the only thing they will ever tell me is ‘Lose weight’?”


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Patients often face added risk beyond concerns of being dismissed or the necessary treatment being denied: the possibility of weight loss treatments and procedures being strenuously suggested at inopportune or irrelevant moments. While the American Academy of Family Physicians recommends screening for obesity along with monthly sessions of counseling and behavioral interventions, the timing of these suggestions is crucial to the impact of motivational interviewing — and execution is often poor. Tan was mid-Pap smear when her doctor asked if she wanted a Weight Watchers pamphlet.

“The speculum’s already in and open. And she says, ‘I can tell you’re getting upset. Do you want me to continue?’” Tan recalled in disbelief. “I said yes because I didn’t want to have to make another appointment for my Pap smear. I was so mad, I was crying at this point. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t yell. She said, ‘I can tell I’ve made you upset, but weight is a serious issue.’”

Although familiar with the prejudice that came with her weight, Belles-Preston was still shocked when her general practitioner recommended weight loss surgery — while she was pregnant. “I walked out of the room. It was so incredibly offensive to me. I’m coming to you for medical advice about my pregnancy, and you’re talking to me about weight loss surgery, which is the furthest thing from my mind.”

“I have tons of resources and attitudes for confronting this kind of stuff, and it can still kill me,” Wann said as I marveled at her calm approach to discussing prejudice so severe it can result in death. “I understand not going [to the doctor]. I think it’s self-protective to some extent.… Every time I go to any kind of medical appointment I anticipate facing weight bias. I anticipate being denied the sort of services thin people would receive with no problem or being targeted for weight-based treatments that I don’t want and could harm me. I’m not interested in stomach amputation or stomach squeezing. I don’t think those are therapeutic practices in any sense. Every time I go see a doctor I’m aware they may casually say the only thing they want me to do is have my stomach cut off.”

* * *

The effects of that bias were traumatizing and long-lasting for Tan. Triggered by her uncomfortable experiences in hospital environments, Tan’s first job as an audiologist after graduate school provoked frequent panic attacks because of its location at a hospital. “I used to have to go to work early so that I could tamp down the panic associated with being in a hospital at all,” she said. “This fear of hospitals hasn’t quite gone away. Most recently, a few months ago, we had to spend a few days in ICU as my partner’s dad passed, and just being back in ICU rattled me so badly it was a month before I could stop popping several Valium a day.”

It was the adversarial relationship she had developed with doctors and nurses that contributed to Tan’s panic. And she’s not alone. For many, thin means healthy and fat means unhealthy. So small and slender equates with good health and is encouraged by medical providers, often resulting in strained relationships with their patients.

The idea that the lower the weight, the healthier the person, escalated into life-threatening conditions for Smith, who was frequently complimented on how healthy she looked while she was starving herself. “When you’re restricting [calories] you can brag about it,” she said, recalling her preparation for the colectomy. “[Doctors] asked, ‘Are you eating well and exercising?’ I said, ‘I’m very healthy. I exercise all the time. I only eat vegetables.’ It’s a funny dichotomy. Just because the scale is low does not mean that you’re healthy. A lot of doctors forget to be careful of that.”

But as the number on the scale climbs, the less flattering characteristics — greed, lack of control, messiness, lack of self-care, laziness, automatic unhealthiness — are associated with fat people, only to be furthered by the media’s portrayal of fat characters, who are typically the butt of jokes or seen as slovenly and undesirable. Women are often the punch lines, much more than men. BMI standards also are more harsh for women than for men, which is apparent in the statistics regarding weight loss surgery: Obesity rates in America are split fifty-fifty between genders, but 80 percent of bariatric surgeries are performed on women. In a 2014 study from Kansas State University, 72.8 percent to 94 percent of overweight and obese men were satisfied with their health as compared with 56.7 percent to 85 percent of overweight and obese women. There’s a reason all the stories and sources here are about and told by women.

“The truth is that there are reasons why fit people live longer, better lives,” Tovar said. “It’s because the entire culture is constructed to benefit them.” Weight discrimination is associated with an increase in mortality risk of nearly 60 percent for both women and men.

Fat activists are working to provide recourse at the community level; patients share the names of fat-friendly doctors or establishments, and Wann uses her social networks to help people get referrals for doctors and other medical providers. She also assists people with planning responses to doctors and providers who inflict weight bias. Fat activist Stef Maruch maintains a list of doctors who do not inflict bias or are fat positive, and Wann encourages people to update it whenever they can. NAAFA also publishes brochures and tool kits to assist fat people in navigating bias and fighting anti-fat legislation. A monthly newsletter updates recipients with the latest research and provides referrals to practical tools like products made for people of size. After Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, NAAFA released a special-edition newsletter and sent plus-size clothing and supplies.

Obesity rates in America are split fifty-fifty between genders, but 80 percent of bariatric surgeries are performed on women.

The organization has also updated the brochure it gives health care providers treating fat patients. It was last updated in 2011, and per the recommendation of one of NAAFA’s advisers, its language is being revised to be much more aggressive when discussing weight bias with medical professionals. “Up until this point we’ve been trying to inform and be a little bit gentle,” explained Peggy Howell, NAAFA’s vice chairman and public relations director, citing the research scientists, Ph.D.s, and professors in medicine, law, nutrition, social work and more who serve on NAAFA’s advisory board. “The advisers came back and said, ‘I think we need to take a different approach. I think we need to be more assertive about this. There are lots of studies that support that this bias does more harm than good to the patients.’” The nonprofit’s 2011 brochure states, “NAAFA is working to help ensure that health care providers provide the best possible care by keeping in mind the special needs of their fat patients.” The new brochure reads, “We currently live in an environment that stigmatizes anyone who does not meet the aesthetic or medically defined categories of an ‘attractive’ or ‘healthy’ weight… [it] creates and sustains fat phobia and oppression, which includes weight bias, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, bullying, violence, and cultural imperialism. … Sometimes the internalized biases of health care providers directly contribute to further stigmatization of fat people.”

There is some movement on the medical end as well, driven by health care providers seeking training and resources. The Rudd Center has developed educational videos, which have been tested and found to reduce weight bias. Viewing the two 17-minute films — “Weight Prejudice: Myths and Facts” and “Weight Bias in Health Care” — resulted in improvement in attitudes toward obese people. The Rudd Center has also created a media repository of 400-plus photos and more than 80 B-roll videos that portray children and adults with obesity in non-stigmatizing ways, intended as a resource of respectful, rather than stereotypical, images for the media as well as scientists and health professionals to use when making educational presentations.

“We’ve created online courses and all different kinds of resources to use to try to increase awareness about this issue and educate providers that this is more than a social justice issue,” Puhl said. “This is a full public health issue. The stigma is making their patients’ health worse.”

For many fat people, the response is too little, too late. “I would rather doctors have signs on their door saying, ‘I don’t treat fat people,’” Wann said. “It would save everyone time and money if they had a sign on their door that said, ‘No fatties.’ At least they would be honest and own their bias.”

***

Carey Purcell is a New-York based writer who covers culture, politics and current events from a feminist perspective. She has been published in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Politico and other publications. She has been a featured guest on AM Joy and Good Morning America, and her writing can be read at CareyPurcell.com.

***

Editor: Michelle Weber
Illustrator: Hannah Perry
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy-editor: Sylvia Tan

We’re All Mad Here: Weinstein, Women, and the Language of Lunacy

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Laurie Penny | Longreads | October 2017 | 13 minutes (3,709 words)

We’re through the looking glass now. As women all over the world come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual violence, all our old certainties about what was and was not normal are peeling away like dead skin.

It’s not just Hollywood and it’s not just Silicon Valley. It’s not just the White House or Fox News.

It’s everywhere.

It’s happening in the art world and in mainstream political parties. It’s happening in the London radical left and in the Bay Area burner community. It’s happening in academia and in the media and in the legal profession. I recently heard that it was happening in the goddamn Lindy Hop dance scene, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Men with influence and status who have spent years or decades treating their community like an all-you-can-grope sexual-harassment buffet are suddenly being presented with the bill. Names are being named. A lot of women have realized that they were never crazy, that even if they were crazy they were also right all along, and — how shall I put this? — they (we) are pissed.

“It’s like finding out aliens exist,” said a friend of mine last night. He was two gins in and trying to process why he never spoke up, over a twenty-year period, about a mutual friend who is facing public allegations of sexual violence. “Back in the day we’d all heard stories about it, but… well, the people telling them were all a bit crazy. You know, messed up. So nobody believed them.”

I took a sip of tea to calm down, and suggested that perhaps the reason these people were messed up — if they were messed up — was because they had been, you know, sexually assaulted. I reminded him that some of us had always known. I knew. But then, what did I know? I’m just some crazy girl.

Read more…

Where Do We Go From Here?

Donald Bowers / Getty Images for The Weinstein Company

Felling a man of Harvey Weinstein’s stature was undoubtedly going to create aftershocks. It must help that the actresses coming forward with accusations against him are famous, people we recognize, people we believe we love even if we don’t actually know them. It helps us to care about them and, as female crew members afraid to come forward about their own abuse told The Hollywood Reporter, it helps the actresses:

“We don’t have the power that Rose McGowan or Angelina Jolie has,” says one female below-the-liner, and others agree that it is a lot easier for a production to replace a woman on the crew than it is to lose a bankable actor or director.

The female crew members told THR they’re afraid to come forward, lest a producer deem them “a liability” or “a troublemaker.” It’s not the men who abuse that are liabilities, it’s the women who would be so inconvenient as to not shut up and take it. One crew member says what many of us know about human resources departments: “Human resources is not there for us; it’s there for the company. To protect it from a liability.” Again, here, the liability is the person who tells the truth, not the person who behaves wrongly.

Still, since the New York Times and the New Yorker published their Weinstein exposés, less famous women have revealed abuse by powerful men. Men have followed with apologies. (The best one came from Ryan Gosling, who said he was disappointed in himself for not knowing about Weinstein’s treatment of women sooner — we’ll come back to this.) Kim Masters was finally able to get an outlet to publish a piece she’d been doggedly working on for months, in which a producer on the Amazon show The Man in the High Castle came forward to report harassment by a top Amazon executive, who has since resigned.

The #MeToo campaign on social media — originally created by a black woman activist, Tarana Burke, 10 years ago and popularized in the wake of Weinstein by actress Alyssa Milano and others — brought out even more stories beyond the entertainment industry. The #MeToo campaign also seems to have been eye-opening for a lot of men. Maybe you think we should be pleased about this, but I feel more like Alexandra Petri, who wrote in the Washington Post, “I am sick of having to suffer so that a man can grow.”

I received a late-night email this week from someone who crossed a line with me 13 years ago. He wrote that he “struggled for a while tonight” with the email, which made me laugh, that he thought I should care that he “struggled” for a few hours that night, after 13 years. But of course he thought that. His whole email was about him. He wasn’t sure if he had done anything wrong, but thought maybe he had. He appeared to not remember that 10 years ago, I had written him an email of my own, telling him how his violation had hurt me. He had dismissed it then, telling me — a college student who had worked up a tremendous amount of courage to even write him that email — that I was overreacting. Hysterical woman, your feelings are incorrect. He wants forgiveness now, but can’t be bothered to go through his email and see that I told him, a decade ago, exactly what he did wrong and how it hurt me.

Read more…

Judging Books By Their Covers

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad / Collage by Richard Kehl/Getty

Jason Diamond | Longreads | October 2017 | 19 minutes (4,639 words)

I had two wardrobes growing up: The first, at my father’s house, was made up of Air Jordans, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein. At my mother’s house I had no-name brands, sneakers that were worn until they were falling apart, and second-hand shirts and sweaters that we’d pick up at the local Goodwill. That was life living under two different roofs of divorced parents in different economic brackets. My father had everything, my mother had very little. My father took us to the mall to buy things, my mother, more often than not, to thrift stores. Malls, where everything was laid out perfectly, were places to be seen carrying shopping bags; thrift stores, meanwhile, were intimate and offered more adventure. At some point, despite kids making fun of me for my shabby clothes, I grew to like the second-hand places more; you never knew what you would find. As I got older, I still shopped at thrift stores out of financial necessity, but it was also an aesthetic choice.

When I think back on the things I found in thrift stores as a teenager, my mind flashes to the jerseys of former Chicago Bulls who played during the first-half of the team’s dynasty run in the 1990s (#54 Horace Grant, #10 B.J. Armstrong), electronics no more than a decade old that were already considered obsolete, and countless copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Like a prospector, I spent my high school years combing through Abercrombie & Fitch shirts worn by the kinds of kids I tried to avoid, strings of used Christmas lights, power suits I considered wearing as a David Byrne in Stop Making Sense Halloween costume, and other things people didn’t want or need anymore, all to find one tiny morsel of gold. Those little nuggets included an “Aloha Mr. Hand” Beastie Boys ringer T-shirt when I was 14 at a Salvation Army, an autographed picture of Tim Allen that I taped up in my locker as a joke, a sealed vinyl copy of Let it Be by The Replacements, and a Mies van der Rohe-designed Barcelona chair for $40. In my trash heap of a college apartment, I played video games and spilled beer on this pricey piece of designer furniture. I assume my roommates threw it out after I left.

I’ve always gravitated towards older things. I didn’t want to wear anything brand new from The Gap or “No Fear” shirts like my classmates did, and I liked the idea of being surrounded by items people didn’t want anymore. I preferred the old VHS players that went out when DVD players came in. Cassette tapes, old copies of National Geographic and Esquire, along with other relics, served as an education of sorts. They were things I saw as a small child but hadn’t been allowed to touch or own. I’d look at old furniture and notice hand-carved signatures in the wood, a sign that somebody had made it — it wasn’t some mass-produced lump of particle board.

Then there were the books. High school had taught me about Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Thrift stores gave me my first tastes of Karl Marx, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, Mary McCarthy, and Salman Rushdie. Both invaluable curriculums, but second-hand books allowed me an opportunity to design my own for about 25 cents a lesson, or five for a dollar. The covers made me feel like I was in a dusty little art gallery: The Modernist designs of Alvin Lustig for New Directions; the iconic, handsome, orange Penguin paperbacks; the seedy, sexy characters of 1950s pulp fiction.

I mostly judged the books by their covers, but there was one in particular I became obsessed with, inside and out. Used copies of this ghostly relic from 1984 are as common in thrift stores as old Barbra Streisand records or Sega Genesis video games. It’s a book I love, which I’ve had on every bookshelf I’ve owned; a book and a cover that I think sum up so much of my taste: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City.

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Ahead by a Century: A Gord Downie Reading List

Gord Downie performs at WE Day in Toronto in 2016. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)

I remember the day in 1987 when my then-boyfriend popped their first EP, “The Tragically Hip” into the cassette player of his dad’s Chrysler Cordoba. When “Last American Exit” came on, I loved it instantly. It’s been on my playlists for 30 years. I’ve seen the Hip at community colleges, hockey rinks, bars, summer festivals, and arenas. I’m part of a swath of Canadians for which the Hip’s music meant good times and Canadian pride; our stories, truths, and landscape writ large in songs with incisive lyrics and driving beats.

Among my favorite Hip songs, “50 Mission Cap” honors Bill Barilko, whose last goal won the 1951 Stanley Cup for the Toronto Maple Leafs. That spring, Barilko went missing on a fishing trip and the Leafs failed to win a cup until 1962, the year Barilko’s remains were discovered. Then of course, there’s “Ahead By A Century,” in which Gord asks us to embrace the moment, reminding us that “there’s no dress rehearsal, this is our life.” Part poet, part visionary, part activist, Gord Downie was a dervish on stage, growling those lyrics into the minds of audiences for three decades.

On October 17th, Downie passed away after battling glioblastoma for two years. In his moving tribute, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “We are less as a country without Gord Downie in it.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Downie is that he chose to spend the last two years of his life accelerating his contribution to social justice, working toward a better life for others, toward a better Canada. He used his profile and his songwriting to foster reconciliation between Canada and First Nations people by raising awareness of the atrocities and generational effects of residential schools. For his work, the Assembly of First Nations honored Downie with an eagle feather and a Lakota spirit name — Wicapi Omani — which means, “Man who walks among the stars.”

Here are five pieces about a man who used story and song to share his Canada and, through personal example, inspired and challenged us to be better as a nation.

1. “For Gord: 27 Short Essays About The Tragically Hip, Plus One Poem” (TheBelleJar, BuzzFeed, June 2016)

In this round-up, 28 fans share their earliest memories of The Tragically Hip and how Gord Downie and his lyrics became the soundtrack to important moments in their lives.

2. “Yer Favourites” (Eric Koreen, Hazlitt, August 2016)

After initial die-hard fandom, Eric Koreen gets turned off the Hip for a decade after getting fed up with a small, boorish, white male contingent of the group’s fan base, interested only in hearing the hits in concert — certainly not opening bands with thoughtful, though lesser-known songs. Koreen eventually reconciles the Hip’s dichotomous hold on Canada, in that they “combine the intellectual side of Canadians — that we’re thoughtful, smart people — with that humble, meat-and-potatoes side, too.” Koreen suggests his change of heart came as a direct result of Gord Downie, who he characterizes as someone who could “be frustrated by your country but not disown it; that you can be an intellectual and an everyman at the same time.”

3. “How I Learned to Love the Tragically Hip and Still Be Punk” (Damian Abraham, Vice, August 2016)

Damian Abraham, vocalist for Canadian hardcore punk band Fucked Up, recounts how he turned from lifelong Hip hater to friend of Gord Downie.

I met Gord properly for the first time in the summer of 2010 backstage at a Tegan and Sara/City and Colour concert. Gord was to join Dallas Green onstage to perform the song they did together on the latter’s Bring Me Your Love record, and I had brought my family with me to watch the show. My son was toddling his way around the backstage with us in tow when tumbled out in front of Gord. After helping him up and making sure he was OK, he picked up Holden’s flung and filthy soother and rushed over the sink to wash it. As he handed back the washed pacifier, I told him that he didn’t need to worry about doing that.

“Of course I did,” he responded.

Youthful exuberance can lead to rashness. In my rush to embrace punk and reject all that didn’t fit with my new world view, I ended up throwing out a lot of culture that I was thankfully able to rediscover later. Of all these bands, there are none I am more grateful to have awoken to the greatness of than the Tragically Hip.

4. “On the Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo and a Shared Legacy” (Michael Barclay, Macleans, August 2016)

Jim Cuddy, of the legendary Canadian band Blue Rodeo, shares stories of times his band and the Hip crossed paths in their early years touring Canada.

We were supposed to be on right before the Hip, but the Eagles inserted some guy whose father owns the Knicks. It was a blues band, and he was terrible. But he had to go on then because it was his plane that the Eagles were flying on.

Then the Hip came on and they were on fire. Gord was in a big white outfit, totally drenched. At the side of the stage is Irving Azoff [longtime Eagles manager and former CEO of Ticketmaster and Live Nation] standing there with the Eagles, and he’s looking at Gord telling him to shorten the set, making gestures. It’s making me furious, because I know the Eagles only want to shorten the set so they can get on a plane and fly out, which they can’t do after midnight or something. So Gord’s doing his thing and continues on. Then the Eagles come on and do a miserable set, just sucking the joy out of the whole island. Afterwards I was sitting with Gord backstage and asked, “Didn’t that bug you?” He said, “Pfft, I never thought in my wildest dreams that I’d be playing and have Irving Azoff telling me to shorten my set.”

5. “Gord Downie opens up about battling cancer, says it’s ‘creating something'” (Peter Mansbridge, CBC News, October 2016)

In his first interview after his cancer diagnosis, Gord Downie talks with Peter Mansbridge about living with cancer.

When you see people now, you want to hug and a kiss. Why is that important to you now?

I do. Yeah. That was happening before, though, all this, strangely. My life was changing and I felt that everyone that hung in there with me, all these years, were still there — they didn’t write me off or anything like that. And they could have. So yes, hug and kiss. And my dad, Edgar, definitely kissed on the lips. And me and my brothers taught a lot of men how to do it.

Reflections of a Lifelong Metalhead

Axel Heimken/AP Images

There are scores of pressing issues in our turbulent world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a moment to discuss things that might seem superfluous. For instance, heavy metal. If you grew up in the late 1980s like I did, you encountered a certain tribe of people wearing torn faded jeans and black band t-shirts who either listened to operatic bands like W.A.S.P. or truly heavy bands like Slayer. Whether it’s the Reagan era or the Trump era, death metal or grindcore, metalheads’ passion has remained undiluted across the decades, even as the music evolves. For many people, all these metal subgenres are confusing and repellent. To fans, they’re exactly the strong medicine that’s needed to get through tough times.

At March Shredness, part of an annual, themed music project, Andy Segedi looks back at his youth as a headbanger. Examining metal’s history and intertwined subgenres, Segedi reflects on what drew him to loud, dark music in the first place, looks at how the debt serious metal owes to lame “hair metal,” and makes a case for all metal.
It’s my opinion that, if you’re one of those people who maybe looks at the dark side of things, has what proudly normal people might consider a socially unacceptable sense of humor, and whose favorite songs tend to be in minor keys, then listening to Sabbath or any of the myriad styles and crossover genres it inspired is an ideal way to safely release (not cause) the accumulated angst and frustration that comes from living in this increasingly self-destructing world.
Best of all, by celebrating the broad metal category, Segedi goes beyond it: even if you don’t like Sabbath or Pantera, loving music is always essential, and bonding with strangers over your chosen tunes is one of the most powerful, joyous aspects of the human experience. Even if it involves a flaming pentagram.

A person’s discovery of music of any kind is a journey, and while for some pop music fads these journeys are relatively brief and uncomplicated (see: disco; fuck: disco), metal is not. It’s been around for almost 50 years now, its mainstream popularity fluctuating like a sine wave but never quite disappearing, just slinking away into the stygian underground to mutate as new hybrid sub-genres and styles emerge. After 50 years of this, things get messy. So unless you were lucky enough to be there at the beginning, your discovery of metal and its offshoots is bound to be just as non-linear and complicated as a particular sub-genre’s influences. Complicated, but still traceable for those who are more forensically inclined, as metal scholar Fenriz of Norwegian black metal pioneers Darkthrone shows in this earnest reconstruction of that particular genre’s lineage.

This complexity might be one reason why metal shows are so… friendly. There’s a sense of community, of comfort and relief in the air. Here, many fans whose backwards employers don’t allow them to wear rock shirts, or display piercings, or grow their hair, or otherwise express themselves in the Holy Workplace are finally among their own kind. Everyone’s there for the same reason, but they each got there a different way, and therefore offer new perspectives on the genre. While waiting in the beer line, complete strangers compare notes on whatever bands they’re repping on our t-shirts. I’m sure this happens at other types of shows, too, but it always happens at metal shows (and I’ve been to more than a few “other” shows where nobody talked to anyone outside their social circles). Anyway, these beer-line conversations almost always include “Dude, if you like [Band A], you’ve got to check out [Band B]” moments, which often lead to momentous discoveries. And momentous metal discoveries are important to explorers like me.

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How the Brazen Are Falling

Ronan Farrow’s recent piece in The New Yorker, the culmination of a 10-month investigation, tells the stories of 13 women — some named, others not — accusing movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault, including three who charge he raped them. Their accounts are supported by interviews with 16 current and former executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies, showing how Weinstein’s abuse of women was systematic, facilitated with the cooperation of a team of producers and assistants who knowingly deposited young women into the hotel room of a despicable predator. As Farrow notes, the allegations “corroborate and overlap with” those published by the New York Times last week.

Like most serial predators, Weinstein had a pattern that the recent exposés have made clear. He or a producer or assistant lured women to his hotel room, where Weinstein would either be in or change into a bathrobe and then attempt to make the woman massage him or watch him shower. In some instances, as with actress Asia Argento, he would forcibly perform oral sex on them, force them to perform it on him, or force himself inside them.

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The Horizon of Desire

(CSA Images/Mod Art Collection/Getty)

Laurie Penny | Longreads | October 2017 | 15 minutes (4,185 words)

“Man fucks woman. Man: subject. Woman: object.”

 —The Fall, Episode 3, “Insolence and Wine”

The first thing you need to understand about consent is that consent is not, strictly speaking, a thing. Not in the same way that teleportation isn’t a thing. Consent is not a thing because it is not an item, nor a possession. Consent is not an object you can hold in your hand. It is not a gift that can be given and then rudely requisitioned. Consent is a state of being. Giving someone your consent — sexually, politically, socially — is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process. It’s an interaction between two human creatures. I believe that a great many men and boys don’t understand this. I believe that lack of understanding is causing unspeakable trauma for women, men, and everyone else who is sick of how much human sexuality still hurts.

We need to talk about what consent really means, and why it matters more, not less, at a time when women’s fundamental rights to bodily autonomy are under attack across the planet, and the Hog-Emperor of Rape Culture is squatting in the White House making your neighborhood pervert look placid. We still get consent all wrong, and we have to try to get it a bit less wrong, for all our sakes.

To explain all this, I’m going to have to tell you some stories. They’re true stories, and some of them are rude stories, and I’m telling you now because the rest of this ride might get uncomfortable and I want you to have something to look forward to.

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